Quote:
Originally Posted by dth656
not to threadjack, but those statistics are interesting. typically fed employement statistics don't capture people who have stopped looking for work, or people who are under employed (example: let's say you used to be an investment banker, but now you work at mcdonalds. while technically you are still employed, you are earning far less than you were previously)
to really get the economy to recover, we woudl need another bubble or consumer growth engine. US consumers are not purchasing as much as they used to, so perhaps chinese or indian consumers will pick up the slack? who knows..
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100% true, unemployment statistics are not completely accurate when it comes to discouraged workers and the underemployed. However, an improving unemployment rate is not to completely be dismissed. An underemployed person has a lot more purchasing power than an unemployed person.
I think you may also be misunderstanding the term bubble. Bubbles are not desirable (yet are almost unavoidable) - bubbles do not represent actual sustainable growth, which is why bubbles burst. The most stable economic expansion is bubble free, though theoretically possible this is regarded as practically impossible. So bubbles will always burst, often small and manageable. But in the case of the recent housing bubble, it was the great extent to which it burst that led to severely depressed market.